A Strategic Framework for Technology Evaluation

A lot of enterprises are using technology strategy in the planning of enterprises' future technology development, but in the technology strategic planning process, enterprises often meet with the practical problem that implementation activities renegades from the previous strategy, and the decisions from the strategy can not be reflected effectively in the daily technology development projects. Based on the literature of macro-marketing and industrial factors, internal technological capability, and technology strategy, this paper develops a framework for classifying and evaluating technologies. The new characteristic of the framework is that it takes both external and internal factors into consideration. With such a framework, development projects with different technologies can be assigned with different priorities and then enterprises can distribute proper levels of resources according to the degrees of importance of these projects to the business. The framework has been applied to and verified in a renowned Chinese manufacturer through a case study.